1. I opened a course on a topic I know nothing about, clicked through without reading anything, and took the assessment. I passed! What does that suggest?

1. I am a genius!
2. The assessment was too easy.
3. Maybe the course was too easy, too.
4. Maybe the course didn’t even need to be written.
5. b, c, and d

2. In a multiple-choice question, when is the longest answer the correct answer?

1. Rarely
2. Sometimes
3. It’s almost always the correct answer, and it’s often stuffed with new information that should have gone in the main part of the course but we forgot so now we’re putting it in the quiz because we can’t possibly leave out the tiniest detail
4. Occasionally

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This post is a small Flash interactive that describes how you can use questions to involve learners in your elearning materials. If your feed strips out embedded Flash, you can play with the interaction on the blog by clicking the title of the post.

Here are two tools that can help you visualize your learners’ experience as they go through your materials, plus some ideas for other visualization techniques.

Three-dimensional graph

You can use a simple spreadsheet in Excel or Open Office to produce a graph like this:

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Research seems to indicate that avatars–animated guides–can help learners. For example, research suggests that we work harder to understand things when we feel like we’re conversing with a person–a person with a personality. Say, like this guy:

Click him to see him in action on California’s Flex Power site. He’s more of a game show host than an avatar, but he shows what enough money can accomplish. But what are the options for the rest of us?
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“Some clients ask me for a boat. What they really need is to cross a river.”–Ronald Shakespear

When we say, “we need a course about X,” we’re talking about a boat. We put all our energy into its design and construction. Everyone wants their favorite features–shiny chrome, a fun game room. But will it get us across the river? Do we even know where we want to go?

What do we really want?

Often we say we want learners to know something. But what we really want is for them to do something. Here’s a quick interactive that shows what I mean.

Canoe or cruise ship? It depends on where you’re going!

Looking for a way to create interactive graphs? Check out Many Eyes, a free service from IBM’s Collaborative User Experience Group.

Here’s an example that shows how class and gender appear to have influenced survival on the Titanic. Play with the visualization on the Many Eyes site to see the data from different perspectives.

At this point, the visualizations you create must be posted publicly on the site. The people behind the service are considering offering access controls.

Jane Hart has asked people involved in elearning to identify their top 10 tools. She’s using the feedback to build an impressive list of recommended tools. Here are some of my favorites, with an emphasis on development tools:

	Great for presentations but also creates interactive Flash files. An overlooked elearning development tool for the Mac.
	Powerful open-source wiki aimed at the corporate market. Makes it easy to incorporate media.
	Small, one-person wiki I use to track clients, projects, and ideas. See a sample on my resources page.
	Lets you create comics from stock photos and other images (for the Mac; Windows version in beta)
	A simplified version of Photoshop. It still has a steep learning curve, but at least the options aren’t quite so overwhelming.
	Powerful screen capture and annotation for Windows
	Free, straightforward HTML editor for the Mac
	Makes it easy to produce basic Flash interactives in Windows
Email subscription	Lets people read blogs as emails rather than through a feed aggregator. Set up by the blog publisher.
WordPress	Open-source blogging software. I created previous blogs in TypePad. WordPress needed a lot more setup time, but it gives me more control over layout and features, and it’s free.

In the show, don’t tell category: We could tell learners, “Obesity is an important problem in the US, and people everywhere are getting fatter every year.” Or we could show them a simple animated graphic that has far more punch.

The drama in 2001: Colorado is the last remaining “thin” state. Will it fall? And is red Mississippi a harbinger of worse things to come?